Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Saturday, April 26, 2003

Maybe You Get the Picture

Just a warning, what follows is a probably embarrassingly sentimental post. Very high mush factor. If that's not the sort of thing you tune in for, you might find that something else is a better use of your time. I'm not embarrassed about writing it, mind you, but some folks aren't too comfortable watching others display deep emotion in public.

Yesterday we received Chris Rice's lastest CD in the Mail. It is titled Run the Earth, Watch the Sky and is excellent. In the last twelve hours I've listened to it about six times. Its pretty much exactly what you'd expect from Mr. Rice: beautiful, slightly elliptical lyrics about deep,personal topics with melodies that are both sweet and intriguingly interesting. Like my favorite diet cola...Light, Crisp, Refreshing...without being cloyingly sugary. If you listen to Christian radio you've heard "The Other Side of the Radio" but, as is often the case, this isn't the best song on the album. That honor probably belongs to "untitled hymn". I won't spoil it for you but if you get a chance to listen to it you may weep with joy as I did. I would love to sing the song for my church but I'm not sure I'd get through the song without choking up.

The other song that really, really speaks to me is the last song on the album, "Circle Up". The song is a great tune about what heaven is going to be like but is has a lot more meaning than that to me. When I was a Boy Scout every meeting and every campfire would end with the words "Circle Up". No matter what had happened over the course of the day, no matter what had been said or done, we would come together as a troop; fathers and sons, brothers and friends, leaders and followers. We would join hands and someone, usually one of the dads, would lead us in a short "devotional". It usually wasn't religious in that God was specifically mentioned but it was definitely spiritual. It almost always centered on character and was deeply contemplative. I'm sure that a lot of the thinking I've done on the man I want to be was begun during one of those devotionals. Then we would sing, all together, a song meant to lift us up and encourage us. Oftentimes it was Kum-bye-yah. I know that the song gets made fun of a lot, but standing in that cicle by the fading light of the campfire with a day full of memories rattling around in my head it never seemed cheesy. It seemed noble and good and right. It lifted what we were doing out of the realm of the everyday to much, much more. The time inspired you to try to be better not by browbeating you but by helping you understand that you could be better.

There are a lot of pictures of heaven. Many of them involve golden streets and mansions on hilltops and the like. I don't like those pictures because they are too much like the valueless things we value here on earth. Who cares about golden streets when you get to spend eternity in the Love that is God. In the Revelation of John there is a picture I like a lot more. All of His children with all the angels and other heavenly beings around the throne of the Lamb, singing. As I listenened to "Circle Up" I was given a clearer picture of what that might be like and it made me cry with joy. In fact, each time today I've thought about it I've become very emotional. I usually get emotional when I take the time to think of heaven and the song really helps me see heaven clearly. I can see God, like some infinitely kind and wise Scoutmaster, asking us all to Circle Up around the throne. In His own unfathomable way He'll say the devotional and then we'll sing. We'll sing Kum-bye-yah and Holy, Holy, Holy and all the other songs that have ever been sung about God and the Lamb. We'll never grow tired of singing and we'll never want to stop listening to that heavenly chorus. Who knows, maybe He'll let all of us Scouts sing a song together. I'd really like that I think.

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